Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

Introduction

[ix] Introduction Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoys an enduring reputation as a principal architect of American intellectual culture and as one of the most significant figures in all of American literary history. That reputation was made during his life, and it has solidified to the point of defying almost all challenges over the one hundred and twenty years since his death. For instance, writing in  during the centenary celebration of Emerson’s birth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson tells the story of a recent election for membership in an “American Hall of Fame” that was to be established in New York. One hundred men and women drawn from the ranks of national and state chief justices, college presidents, historians and scientists, magazine and newspaper editors , and authors were polled on fifty candidates proposed for the honor, and a majority of votes was required for election. In the end, twenty-nine persons were elected to the American Hall of Fame, the first seven of whom were presidents, statesmen, and jurists, and the eighth, Emerson.1 When a similar poll was taken in New York City in  to identify the “Ten Greatest Americans,” and the rules were changed so that no one born before   could be considered for the honor, Emerson fared even better. Abraham Lincoln came in first and, in an ironic twist, Emerson just barely edged out Henry David Thoreau for second place; William Lloyd Garrison,Theodore Parker, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, among others, followed. Emerson was praised as “our one clearest, purest and most exalted American mind. Not our greatest, but surely our serenest thinker. The friend pre-eminently of those who would live in the spirit.”2 Such rankings close to his own time anticipate many of those we see today in which Emerson always places at or very close to the top of lists of America ’s most original native-born intellectuals and writers. His centrality to all accounts of American cultural history has been supported by the publication of a substantial body of his personal writings in recent decades, the scope of which surpasses that of the personal writings of any other Ameri- emerson in his own time can author. Comprehensive modern editions of Emerson’s correspondence, journals, and notebooks, as well as of his sermons and lectures, are now available to amplify the range of reference in both biographical and critical studies of his life and thought.3 The personal writings of those closest to him—his first wife,Ellen Louisa Tucker; his second wife,Lidian; his daughter Ellen; and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson—are now also available, and along with Emerson’s personal writings form an extraordinary archaeology of his domestic sphere.4 Complementing these Emerson family materials are authoritative editions of the personal and other writings of individuals with whom Emerson enjoyed the most long-lasting and, from the point of view of his intellectual and aesthetic development, influential relationships: Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Carlyle, the poet William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Hoar, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, to name just a few. Finally, recent primary and secondary bibliographies relating to Emerson’s writings and writings about him and a chronology of his life provide reliable starting points for inquiry into his career and personal as well as professional relationships.5 But long before these remarkable resources became available for the study of Emerson,his friends and associates,reviewers of his lectures and publications , literary historians, social critics, and reporters of nineteenth-century American life writing for readers at home and abroad all had reason to comment on his life and, both before and after his death, speculate on his ultimate place in the pantheon of America’s great writers and thinkers. In the accounts that follow, Emerson’s contemporaries describe the essentials of his character, use personal observation to chart the development of his ideas and reputation,and detail significant transitions in his personal life across all the major phases of his career. William Henry Furness, Amos Bronson Alcott , Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, Edwin Percy Whipple, and Frank Bellew provide rare insights into Emerson’s personality and his evolving friendships; Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and A. B. Muzzey into his life first in the pulpit and then on the lyceum circuit; Fredrika Bremer and Francis Espinasse into his emergence in the late s and throughout the 
s as an American with an international reputation; Julia Ward Howe, Ednah Dow Cheney...